Author: Beena

The Other 1880 Town in South Dakota. (The one with robots)

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The Western States are full of Old West themed tourist attractions and old west towns both real and manufactured. There is one in South Dakota called 1880 Town which by most accounts seems to be one of the better ones. Visitors can dress up in period clothing and they have a wonderful collection of props from Dances with Wolves. I’ve never been to it. This is not about that 1880 Town. This is about a different one.

If you’ve seen Dances with Wolves you actually know what a lot of the state really looks like. It’s very… grassy.

This is about the one in the town of Buffalo Ridge, which as near as I can tell is actually just a gas station. This is about the one populated entirely by robots.

this one

YES.

ROBOTS.

Now, I experience a self doubt spiral and question my talents and career approximately twice a week, but one thing that always fills me with seething regret is animatronics. Why on Earth didn’t I ever pick up any basic robotic engineering!?

In retrospect, of course, the signs were there. There were so many sparks that could have lit the fire in my developing brain: the singing gang of anthropomorphic animals at Chuck E. Cheese birthday parties, the swarthying pirates of the Pirates of Caribbean Ride at Disney, the almooost lifelike repetitive movements of jungle animals at Rainforest Cafe, the scene in Wayne’s World where Garth casually works on a robotic hand in his free time. None of it did. Maybe I’ll go ahead and blame society for not pushing girls towards science and engineering or my art oriented right brain dominance, but at the time of this writing, I never picked up the skills required to do much more than install an after market radio in my car, but I sorely wish I had.

A man named Bill in South Dakota apparently did not miss the signs. The story goes that he is singularly responsible for the building and once a year maintenance of all of the robots here since it’s building in the 70’s. Those in the best condition are inside the store and include a full saloon in all it’s gambling, piano playing, bar tending, potential prostitution glory and a very strange singing gorilla.

For the love of God, do not let this be the robot that develops sentience

This one man job through 40 years of plains dust and plains snow has left in just the sort of condition I love the most… various stages of decay and function.

early Westworld prototype

The town itself is behind the Buffalo Ridge gas station and store where you buy buffalo meat and a range of Knick knacks and admission to the town out back. It contains all the greatest hits of the Old West Town of our collective mind arranged along one Main Street: A gallows, a saloon, a gold mine, a post office, even a dentists office.

the main drag the usual suspects

Each of these contains a tableau, either moving or formerly moving, operated by pressing a button or sometimes standing on a certain place

oh this is gonna be good

yep, it’s really good.

These scenes show ordinary life not much different than ours besides the fashions, and scenes quite a lot more “frontier-sy” . There were a lot more ghosts back then you know.

post office customer service is one of the constants of the universe

all haunted saloons should come with signs like this so consumers can make educated choices

Hand painted signage explains the scenes before you so as to make the town theoretically educational, probably one of the bullet points any kitch roadside attraction has to hit to qualify for my top 10.

rare photo of the man who went on to become the Cryptkeeper in his younger years

mmmmmmmmm I feel awkward

Some of 1880 Cowboy Town’s characters and information are familiar like its homage to Abraham Lincoln, and some less so, like the story of Potato Creek Johnny, a very small man who found gold in the Dakota Territory and who I had never heard of, so I guess this truly is an educational place.

Abe lost his hat

actually pretty terrifying

now you too know the Legend of Potato Creek Johnny

And even some of the familiar characters may seem different than you remember

wtf y’all

The town has everything it needs for both the life and the death of its citizens. Including a sheriff station with a gallows and a coffin shop.

try this on for size

Perhaps best of all, it has it’s own frontier cemetery, complete with period correct wooden tombstones and hand painted witty epitaphs.

Dad jokes for… well, eternity I guess

In what I might call the town square in this circumstance, stands The Worlds Largest Six Gun Shooter, the gun that won the West.

wondering where the “big things” was gonna come in were ya?

This thing actually seems pretty small but the sign says it’s the biggest and really if some jerk went and built a bigger six gun to steal the title from this one gas station town, I wouldn’t acknowledge them. Choose a different number of chambers, man.

I’ve always wanted to take one of these wacky perspective photos and then I just go and blink

Overall, 1880 Cowboy town isn’t exactly a museum. It’s not even what I would call “accurate”. The year 1880 here isn’t exactly idealized, but it’s not really realistic either.

I’m hesitant to wholly condemn the romanticization of the American West. I’m certainly guilty of it, but it was never something I did on purpose. Life on the frontier was, for the most part, horrible and short for both the settlers and the Natives they displaced. In my mind though, there has always been another American West. Not the real one, full of cholera and lawlessness and genocide, but the other one. The one you see when you put on a sheriff badge and a cap gun as a child. The one full of heroes and outlaws who were still good guys, and horse chases and buffalo herds and dying by flipping over and turning into a tidy tombstone in Oregon Trail. As you grow up, and learn more, you slowly realize that was never the West, and how you pictured it fades and gets grittier and more dirty and the parts that used to fit together fall apart. 1880 Cowboy Town sort of looks like that; A child’s dream of the American West, exposed to truth and wind and dust for 40 years.

Mardi Gras for non Mardi Gras People

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I will never go to Mardi Gras. It is my personal version of Hell.

I respect Mardi Gras. I love the tradition of it. I love the spectacle. I love the weirdness and the mixture of Pagan ritual and Christian celebration into a new and unique thing. I also love New Orleans. So much.

But alas, I don’t drink, I hate large crowds and feeling claustrophobic, I have little patience for overindulgence, and I don’t eat dairy or eggs, so king cake and beignets and basically all Cajun food is a no-go for me and so every time the opportunity to go to Mardi Gras has come up I have wholeheartedly and absolutely refused.

Luckily, there is a place for people like me. That place is Mardi Gras World.

Gonna go ahead and call this as the World’s Largest Jester head.

If you’ve ever been on a cruise that leaves from New Orleans you have seen Mardi Gras World. It’s literally in the port. You probably stared at it while you were waiting in port traffic to get to your ship. Aside from the few characters outside it’s a totally unremarkable building, very large and low and white. It looks like a warehouse because it’s a warehouse.

I tried to figure out a pun using the word “cruise” and “krewes” but I couldn’t do it

This is the production and storage facility of Kern studios, one the largest manufacturers of Mardi Gras floats. The story goes that local artist Roy Kern caught the attention of the captain of a local Mardi Gras Krewe during the depression and he and his son began building floats for them. Kern Studios was founded in 1947 after Blaine, Roy’s son, had become the city’s leading parade and float designer. It was open to the public for tours in 1984.

Do not recommend taking psychedelics before coming

A ticket gets you a tour. We were there on the off season (November) and were actually the only ones on our tour which was great because we got to skip the “try on costumes” bit for kids, and were basically left alone and unsupervised to wander a warehouse full of wonders after we were done.

Making floats for Mardi Gras is a year round job so there are multiple artists on site at all times actually in the process of making props for floats.

You ever realize that you really messed up in choosing a career path?

The process is still remarkably old school. Most of the large elements are made from many layers of styrofoam glued together and then carved by hand into the appropriate shape. They are then covered in paper maché and eventually painted. Kern studios possesses only one automated machine, a laser cutter which was cutting out fluer du lies, I think for the Endymion Super Krewe’s floats, but don’t quote me. Everything else is done by hand by a real human person. This makes the storage of all these elements even more important because they are often reworked and reused. Even paper flowers and leaves are salvaged from the floats and repainted to new varieties.

This lady head may have been many characters over the years, getting different hair and paint jobs

Because there is no official “boss” of Mardi Gras, and Krewes are non profit and self governing, there is no official theme of Mardi Gras, and even it’s ‘official’ colors were simply chosen by the Rex Krewe at one point and stuck. Even so, Krewes do generally choose one, often kept secret until the parade. Sometimes they seem to be related to the times (patriotic themes post 9-11) sometimes not (many of the floats in the warehouse while we were there were Greek mythology themed)

stoned fish and friends contemplating paper flowers

Actually one of the funnest things about Mardi Gras World was trying to imagine the float and theme each piece came from

Obviously the place was full of recognizable characters. I asked the tour guide how they handled copyright issues, and she said they usually just make the character recognizable but not not exact so technically it’s hard to sue them over it. I’m sure they avoid Disney characters like the plague.

Knowing Gene Simmons, he probably still sued them for this

After our tour was finished, the ridiculously trustworthy staff just left us to wander around as long as we wished. Random staff members saw us wandering among the floats and props and simply headnodded. We pretty much only left because the sun went down and the warehouse has limited light and heat. I was satisfied. I got to see the riot of colors and art of Mardi Gras without the actual parade.

probably my best use of my phones panorama feature to date

At any rate, I’ve managed to secure myself a king cake without eggs or dairy in it which I’ve been munching on while writing this and it needs to stop. So I’m going to stop writing also.

I guess I talked so much about Mardi Gras World that I didn’t talk much about Mardi Gras itself. The basics of Mardi Gras are that it’s a very large, very long party leading up to the Lenten fasting and culminating on the Tuesday before Ash Wednesday, or Fat Tuesday. If you want to learn more about the history of Mardi Gras, this is a good place to start.

http://www.mardigrasneworleans.com/history.html

This is the website for Mardi Gras World www.mardigrasworld.com

A Small Collection of Some of the World’s Largest Random Objects

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I’ve recently discovered that the Guinness Book of records doesn’t care about the same things I do. These days, they’re more focused on natural occurrences like biggest waterfall or crazy stuff animals do. They like human activities and feats of endurance and strength rather than the objects they build. There’s an entire separate book of records for gaming related records now. I’m not judging, but who buys that? At any rate, relatively few things claiming to be the World’s Largest are independently verified by Guinness except when people are actually trying to one up a previous example, so all you really have to do most of the time is just call yourself The World’s Largest Whatever and if no one challenges you, you are.

The Worlds Largest Bobbing Head, found at Wild Bill’s Nostalgia Center, Middletown, CT. Bill petitioned to have this declared the Worlds Largest Bobbing Head Doll by Guinness, but apparently they weren’t buying the doll part and don’t have a category for just Bobbing Head, which is pretty downright unamerican

All that is to say that this list is not scientific in any way. The closest I came to verifying these claims was to check them against Wikipedia’s woefully incomplete list of Worlds Largest Objects.

The World’s Largest Bug, who is a termite evidently named Nibbles Woodaway, sitting on top of Big Blue Bug Solutions (formerly New England Pest Control) in Providence, Rhode Island. Also seen in the classic masterpiece of cinema Dumb and Dumber

The reasons for building a Large Object vary I suppose. Most of the time they’re promotion in some way or another. A company headquarters, a roof of a business, a mascot. To be fair, if someone else had a bigger Mr Potatohead than Hasbro that would be pretty awkward.

World’s Largest Mr Potatohead, unchallenged and undefeated, outside of Hasbro headquarters, Pawtucket, Rhode Island

Sometimes they celebrate a hometown hero. Warren, Ohio has an alley devoted to Foo Fighters drummer Dave Grohl where they display the worlds largest pair of drumsticks

I feel like making these from telephone poles was kind of… phoning it it. (Get it!?) but work smarter not harder as they say

A lot of the time they celebrate a crop the area is famous for. I can’t be the only one who thinks South Carolina deserves to be the peach state more than Georgia does, but more on how our license plates misrepresent our true strengths at a later time. (Spoiler alert: it’s going to be about peanuts)

Full disclosure someone sent me this. I have approximately 20 blurry photos of the Gaffney Peach taken from a moving car on the drive between my home state of Virginia and my current state of Georgia. World’s Largest Peach, Gaffney, South Carolina

Very often Worlds Largest objects fall into the category of public art. Upon reflection for the purpose of writing this post, the primary difference between a “public art work” and a roadside oddity is where you put it and who pays for it. If it’s paid for with tax dollars it’s art.

The World’s Largest Fire Hydrant or ‘Busted Plug Plaza’ by artist Blue Sky in Columbia, SC. I’ve never heard someone refer to a fire hydrant as a plug in real life so if you have please record it and send it to me

If it’s displayed at a museum or on museum grounds it’s probably art.

This World’s Largest Safety Pin in City Park in New Orleans, LA is tied for the title with an identical pin at the De Young Museum in San Francisco. Both made by artists Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen.

If if it’s marked with the name of the artist or it’s easy to find the Artists name, it’s art.

My other job is making jewelry from human teeth so the World’s Largest Tooth is a special collision of worlds for me. Part of a rotating sculpture park where artist J. Seward Johnson stores his larger than life pieces waiting to lease them out to other cities for display. Trenton, NJ

Other times large objects are made for special occasions. Several of the largest cooking utensils were made to cook record breaking food, like the cherry pie pan in my first post. (Read it) A traveling exhibit about the history of toys, which I suspect was financed at least in part by Mattel, and stopped through the Virginia Historical Society last year boasted two of the World’s Largest objects, one which stood outside to attract visitors and the other made for the exhibit by an artist.

The World’s Largest Gumby, probably not much competition, Virginia Historical Society Richmond, VA

I actually expected this to be bigger. Where is the ambition people?

So there ya have it, a small handful of totally randomly selected objects which may or may not be the World’s Largest of their kind but nobody seems to be arguing and I couldn’t figure out how to thematically link.

If you want to see the aforementioned tooth jewelry you can find me at extollojewelry.com

If you want to know more about J. Seward Johnson here’s his website http://sewardjohnsonatelier.org/

And the website for Grounds for Sculpture groundsforsculpture.org

If you want to know more about anything else try google.com

Dinosaur Land, the roadside dinosaur equivalent of an animal shelter

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It’s not really my intention to make my posts here have so many dang words in them, but this one is about to have a lot.

First of all, I don’t think there’s anything more quintessentially American quirk than a roadside dinosaur. They once filled the quasi- educational roadside forests and  mini golf courses and grassy knolls next to parking lots of America in every size and color, and they are, sadly, slowly following in the footsteps of their prehistoric ancestors to extinction.

90% certain this dinosaur’s name is Kevin

Secondly, this particular trip is extra important to me because I took it with my father. You’ll see him in some of the photos. Last year he got a cancer diagnosis and this was during a visit to him in the oppressive time between diagnosis and treatment when everyone is supposed to be pretending they’re not freaking out. I had a few days to spend there after a tour and as he always does, he offered the choice of activity to me, and cheerfully agreed when I suggested something that involved an annoying drive and nothing he was particularly interested in. Since these were taken he’s had surgical treatment, and been declared cancer free. At the time though, nobody knew what was going to happen, and it occurred to me that this could be our last adventure together. It won’t be, but had that ended up the case, I think it was a pretty good one.

There are precious few roadside dinosaur parks left in this cold world you guys.

IMG_9604

“Featuring over _ replicas from the past”

Dinosaur Land is in White Post, Virginia, which is maybe an hour and a half roughly west of Washington D.C. It’s now an actual place where people live with a Target and stuff, but I would imagine that’s relatively recent. Apparently what is now Dinsosaur Land started out as something called Dixie Trading Post or some such thing (there’s still an uncomfortable section of Confederate flag gifts of every description in the gift shop) back when the area was mostly farmland until they acquired the first Dinosaurs in the early 60’s

IMG_9607

At some point you could stand inside this

You can definitely tell which are the original dinosaurs, and as is often the case, the originals are the best. The mid to late 60’s marked something sometimes called the dinosaur renaissance in which the scientific community started rapidly changing it’s ideas about what dinosaurs actually looked like and how they acted. These early dinosaur acquisitions were pre/ early dinosaur renaissance and so the most wonderful thing about many of them is they are quite wrong

“I’m a T-Rex. Rarrrr”

he kind of looks like a pit bull

In spite of this they do make an adorable effort to make the park legitimately educational. I was way too excited but if I had a kid with me, I’d definitely force them to read the signs.

he does look like he’d be a sweet boy

zoomed in on this and learned that Pteranodon’s bony head crest might have worked as a stabilizer in flight

If becoming scientifically obsolete wasn’t bad enough, another factor in the extinction of the roadside dinosaur is their maintenance. As near as I can tell most of them are basically made from freakin’ paper maché. Later ones are fiberglass or some kind of combo of the two. Over time this doesn’t mix well with the elements and dinosaurs need constant maintaining in the form of having their forms patched and being repainted. A desert dinosaur might fare better (I’m looking at you, Pee Wee’s Great Adventure Dinosaur) but in Virginia humidity all of these specimens are at the very least covered in moss, at the most disintegrating. Dinosaur Land charmingly deals with damaged dinosaurs by simply making what’s wrong with them part of the tableau, so a whole lot of them are fighting to explain their “injuries”.

Everyone knows dinosaurs don’t have knees

The roughest dinosaur in the collection has a completely caved in side. He’s been flipped on his side and is in the process of being defeated by a newer and more anatomically correct Megalosaurus

This picture does look kinda epic from this angle though

Sometimes it’s just a matter of rearranging them and painting a little strategic blood around.

The dinosaur version of knocking your shin on a coffee table

Despite the name, Dinosaur Land also has quite a few creatures which are not dinosaurs at all. Some are original to the prehistoric forest (because who cares about a few hundred thousand years which would have separated species). Some are obviously rescues, probably from Mini Golf courses.

“Ssssssssssss”

I’m either really big or that plane is really small, it’s up to you

Dinosaur Land also gives less shits about timeline continuity than new Star Trek so I suspect they’ve been mixing the Pleistocene with the Mesozoic pretty much all along.

Actually quite painful

Were their tusks really like this because I’d be scared too if my tusks were constantly pointing at my eyes

My personal favorite of these later era animals was the giant ground sloth. For one thing, I think this is the animal of the past science should be focusing on trying to clone. Secondly, someone had the idea when this was made to cover it in faux fur. After all this time outside it is absolutely terrifying, and that’s not even including its feet.

rethink your business plan Jurassic Park

Dinosaur Land was never the brainchild of one artist, so all of the dinosaurs seem to be in batches, but apparently once you’re known as the dinosaur people, people just try to unload all sorts of dinosaurs on you, and what kind of monsters turn away a homeless dinosaur. These guys, which either don’t make sense in terms of scale or construction, are apparently relegated to wandering the outskirts of the woods

look, I know science is important, but

man this guy looks out of place

The whole place is pretty small. The prehistoric forest probably took half an hour including photo ops, so if you’re reading this with the intention of actually going to White Post, don’t plan a full day trip. And don’t plan on eating anywhere near it. And do bring some money to spend in the gift shop.

If you love roadside dinosaurs and want to see more of them famous roadside photographer John Margolies ‘s portfolio was recently released by the Library of Congress and Atlas Obscura wrote a cool little article about his Dinos https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/roadside-dinosaurs-concrete-americana

Dinosaur land also has a website that’s actually amazingly slick. http://dinosaurland.com/

Until next time!

Oh hey y’all

/ Beena / Leave a comment

I’ve always loved the weird. My roommate says this is the fault of my birth chart which attracts people born under my combination of planets to things that other people may find strange or dark. I don’t know if that’s true, but I suppose it’s as good an explanation as any.

If you haven’t, I recommend pretty much everyone read the fantasy masterpiece American Gods by Neil Gaiman (along with basically everything else he’s ever written). In the story, the Gods of the old world meet up at Roadside Attractions because they are places of power. In it, as authors often do, Gaiman managed to get a hold of something I could never quite organize into thoughts about my attraction to weird roadside Americana, aside from the fact that I always felt I was only inches from being able to understand what would drive someone to abandon everything and instead move to nowhere and build a castle out of bottle caps or something.

“In other countries, over the years, people recognized the places of power. Sometimes it would be a natural formation, sometimes it would just be a place that was, somehow, special. They knew that something important was happening there, that there was some focusing point, some channel, some window to the Immanent. And so they would build temples or cathedrals, or erect stone circles, or…well, you get the idea.”

“There are churches all across the States, though,” said Shadow.

“In every town. Sometimes on every block. And about as significant, in this context, as dentists’ offices. No, in the USA, people still get the call, or some of them, and they feel themselves being called to from the transcendent void, and they respond to it by building a model out of beer bottles of somewhere they’ve never visited, or by erecting a gigantic bat house in some part of the country that bats have traditionally declined to visit. Roadside attractions: people feel themselves pulled to places where, in other parts of the world, they would recognize that part of themselves that is truly transcendent, and buy a hot dog, and walk around, feeling satisfied on a level they cannot truly describe, and profoundly dissatisfied on a level beneath that.

In reading the epilogue of American Gods I was excited and shocked to learn that the Roadside Attraction much of the book takes place in was a real place. The House on the Rock in Northern Wisconsin. A bucket list was born in my heart.

For several years, I have been working as a tour manager for a rock band called the Biters, which has given me an incredible opportunity to travel the country. I began to seek out off the beaten path attractions to visit while touring. Mostly Cemeteries (my first love) and more “traditional” roadside attractions and urban exploration. The so-called travel bug got it’s hooks into me. Deep.

On a tour of the Midwest I found myself in Traverse City, Michigan. I’ve always associated Michigan with manufacturing and that famous Kiss Concert at a high school, but it turns out it’s also quite famous for its cherries. Traverse City once made a record holding cherry pie and kept the pan. We climbed in it for a photo. I suddenly realized some of world’s largest random objects had become a pattern and Beena and the big things was born.

The World’s largest cherry pie pan which once held the world’s largest cherry pie. Traverse City, Michigan

Roadside Attractions are a dying breed, they are inherently nostalgic. If I ever have children they may never get to see an old school mini golf course, a roadside dinosaur, or a wax museum. Their transience makes seeing them feel more important, and maybe almost noble.

So here are my adventures across America. It’s not the temples or castles or monoliths of older parts of the world. It’s the sad and the strange and the kitschy and the larger than life, which is pretty darn American if you ask me.